This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. In this continuation segment, Novell Chairman Jack Messman calls open source a "powerful force" that is changing the software industry. One thing I didn't know is that, according to Jack, most software is written inside businesses for internal use. He says that more and more of the companies will need to turn to the open source community to cope with the costs of writing the code, debugging the code, and maintaning the code. As an example of the economies of open sourcing code, he says that large companies might have to put 500 in-house developers on a big code project that, with by open sourcing, they would be able to complete by assigning only 50 developers in-house, with a reasonable expectation of getting interest on the part of say 2,000 developers from the open source community at large.

He describes open source as a disruptive technology, and a peer-reviewed meritocracy. Jack doesn't go into too much detail about that here, but he does give us a good short sound bite, so this is the snip to go to for that short sound bite if you need it.

Jack says that historically, 75% of revenue from software-related sales and services came from the licensing income itself; that 18% came from upgrade protection; and that 7% of the revenue came from selling support. With open source software, he says, the 75% licensing fee cost is not present.

(Jack doesn't say as much explicitly in this snip, but you can easily see from comparing his pervious snips here on the IA DTP Collection, he is talking about Novell's competition with Microsoft. Jack says early in the interview that Novell had moved to living on support contracts. Microsoft, by contrast, lives on licensing sales. The spread of Linux therefore favors Novell tremendously over Microsoft. Hence Novell's support of open source, and Microsft's enmity of open source).

Jack says that any CIO could track the 3700 packages and their dependencies, but that Novell does that for its customers. Novell does bug fixes, checks licenses, and that is the value it adds to the code. All of this makes it easier for CIOs to use the code.

tape id = e-dv168_sf_03_messman_004.mpg

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at gmail.com.

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